by Jenn Coyle
December 27, 2013
You can find Jenn doodling and blogging, drinking beer, or running around Philly.
Best of 2013: Medialoot’s most helpful design resources & blog posts
Here at Medialoot, we're all about bringing you top quality graphic design resources as well as design related articles and tutorials. As 2013 comes to a close we're reflecting on our most popular and most helpful assets and blog posts of the year.
2013 has been an amazing year for Medialoot, including a brand new design, and us hiring new designers and celebrating our lead designer.
Medialoot is growing quickly, and we are very grateful to you for continuing to utilize our site and for being an amazing part of the design community. While we've already taken a peek at what 2014 has in store in terms of web design, we wanted to take a moment to recognize the top blog posts and most downloaded and shared resources in 2013.
Most helpful freebies of the year
Free iOS 7 UI Kit
With Apple's highly anticipated iOS 7 launch this past fall, the new design styles went viral. It's no surprise to us that our top two freebies of 2013 are iOS 7 related, with this thin and flat fully-vectorized UI kit as well as our App Icon Kit.
iOS 7 App Icon Kit
This App Icon Kit has downloads in the 60,000's. It's proven to be super helpful for anyone needing to create an app icon for their app design.
Tri Fold Brochure Mockup Template
Print mockup templates are hugely important in order to showcase your designs to clients. Using Smart Objects, this resource allows you to drop in your finished images and show your brochure in a realistic 3D setting.
Flat Vector Icons
These beauties have received a lot of attention on freebie sites. This set by Tony includes 50 total icons, both framed and unframed, in the flat design style. They are supplied as 100% vector files for Illustrator and Smart Objects in Photoshop. Also included are individual transparent .png files at a plethora of dimensions from 24 to 1024 pixels.
It’s Flat! 48 Free Vector Icons
Icon sets are extremely popular on Medialoot, and we're glad we can provide you with a wide variety. This set of 48 icons by Sebastiano feature flat design styles with subtle gradients and detailing to give a nice tactile feel. These are also infinitely scalable icons, created in Photoshop with vector layer styles only.
Most helpful Premium Resources of 2013
While our freebies are wildly downloaded and shared, our premium resources demonstrate that extra level of pizazz and design acumen. Here are the top 5 premium resources of the year.Signia Vector Icon Pack
Signia is a huge collection of over 600 vector icons: you're almost guaranteed to find an icon for your needs in this set. Each glyph has been hand-crafted to the highest quality with designers and developers in mind. Our goal, when designing this set, was to include as many unique icons across multiple applications as possible, making it your go-to icon pack.
Each icon in the Photoshop source file is a single shape that can be filled with any color, or easily styled with layer styles. And every icon has been organized and split into categories, so it’s easier to find exactly what you’re looking for. The icons come in many file formats, including PSD, Illustrator, EPS, PNG and SVG.
Best of all, Signia is always growing and adapting to new icon needs. View the Signia product page to
Vintage Infographic Vector Kit
It's no secret that infographics are becoming increasingly more ubiquitous. Important and interesting data is most appreciated when combined with design elements in order to communicate the ideas beautifully. We recently shared some tips on designing an infographic for maximum share-ability.
While this vintage infographic kit isn't the only kit available on Medialoot, it's easily the most popular for this year. The resource includes modern sans serif typographic features, flat graph types, and fully vectorized elements.
Seamless Subtle Grunge Textures
Vintage and subtle grunge design styles are huge for 2013. This seamless subtle grunge texture pack is no exception, and made it into the top 5 most downloaded premium resources on Medialoot this year. This resource, containing 20 seamless patterns, are great for adding texture to your work as well as using them as product presentation backgrounds.
HTML Newsletter Email Template
It's been proven by marketing blogs that email is still the best way to go in terms of reaching out to your audience and maintaining a personal level of communication. Therefore, it's also essential to have a beautiful email newsletter template as well — and our HTML Newsletter Email Template is here to help. Because this resource is fully-coded and designed in Photoshop, it's easy to make tweaks to make this template your own, or use as-is, as it was designed for universal appeal.
Vector Outlined Glyph Icons
There are 140 cute little glyphs in this resource. Each icon is designed as 24 x 24 pixels so they are very small, but not too small to have plenty of style and character. As vectors, they are infinitely sizable. They are designed to be suitable for use in mobile apps and on the web. We included multiple file types for this resource, including PSD, AI, EPS and SVG.
Essential Shapes Collection
The default shapes that come with Adobe Photoshop can be limiting. We created this essentials shapes set of 128 great vector shapes to increase your toolbox for ease of designing. This back to basics set includes essential shapes such as a variety of arrows, speech bubbles, cursors and much more. They are particularly useful for wireframing websites and apps.
Best blog posts of 2013
From Photoshop and Illustrator tutorials to discussing big design trends, we had fun on the blog this year. We're excited to see what 2014 has in store for us in terms of our blog.How To Create a Cartoon-Style Illustration in Photoshop
In this video tutorial we show you how to create a cartoon-style illustration of an ax in Photoshop. We spend time with layer masks, the pen tool, and Photoshop brushes. Finally, we import and apply a vector pattern from Illustrator to Photoshop. At the end of this tutorial you should be able to easily create your own cartoon-style illustrations of just about any object.
Flat Design vs Usable Design
Flat Design is a huge trend for 2013 and will probably continue to be in 2014. Design trends are the same as fashion trends: some should be taken with a grain of salt, some should be adapted to your needs, and some should be ignored altogether. In this blog post, Sebastiano takes an honest look at what flat design is and what it really means for web and UI design.
Style Guides: A Design Mock-up for the Responsive Web
Designing for the responsive web is certainly different than designing entire web pages in one static Photoshop document. Style guides, as presented by Tony, are a great way to adapt design concepts to present to your clients while allowing the different elements to fit within the various resolutions that responsive web design calls for. In this blog post, Tony presents solutions for the once-static Photoshop mockup process, and also shares a downloadable Style Guide template.
Why UI Designers Should Learn to Code
While specializing in one field of design can allow you to excel and dive deep into that one area, it can also present a certain handicap. In this blog post, Sebastiano explains why it's important for graphic designers to learn to code in order to increase their understanding of the end product and improve workflow.
How to Create a Detailed Audio Rotary Knob Control in Photoshop & Illustrator
Tony, a synth fan himself, has created a really cool audio UI kit for Medialoot. In this tutorial post, he teaches you step by step how to recreate this amazingly realistic audio knob using Photoshop and Illustrator.
iOS 7 Design Guide
As we opened this post with iOS 7 related design resources, we're closing this post with our iOS 7 Design Guide blog post. iOS 7 proved to be a momentous occasion in the design community this year, so this seemed appropriate! In this post, Tony provides a guide that outlines how designers can ensure their apps fit in with the new design style.
Again, we'd like to thank you for an awesome 2013. We hope you found all of our resources and blog posts helpful, and we look forward to an even better 2014. As always, we encourage you to submit your requests to us; we love being able to provide resources and tutorials. Comment below with your favorite things from 2013 or with resource suggestions.
Happy New Year!
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